If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: "The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice", what are you going to do?
The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote … [Read more...]

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator's old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities!
As soon as you place or paste a photo into … [Read more...]

Many people have asked me this question and, in the absence of a Wikipedia entry, here's my definition.
The term pre-dates desktop publishing when "artwork" or "mechanical art" meant the material (photography, bromide, film, tranparency) or completed, camera-ready pages that … [Read more...]

Preparing artwork for huge exhibition spaces or large point-of-sale displays in Photoshop can be a nightmare and can use up precious processing time on your computer. And this is even if you have a Dual 2 GHz G5 Mac with 3 GB of RAM!
But there's no need to keep the high … [Read more...]

One of the most asked questions on graphic design forums is: "How much I should charge?" Well, the answer is, I don't know! But here is a list of my most recent price quotes. These design estimates include image sourcing and copy editing but assume images and most text have … [Read more...]

Here are some icons I designed for a friend's website. He asked me to make them at three sizes: 20 pixels wide, 80 pixels wide and 300 pixels wide.
There's a real skill to designing icons. You have to make them simple enough to be understandable at small sizes but interesting … [Read more...]

Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply?
Answer: Email a PDF.
Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present … [Read more...]

Choose and bold sans serif for your type. This is Arial black. Rasterize Type. Rotate canvas by 90º clockwise. In order to get points coming from the top of the type it needs to be white out type on black on the same layer. Go Filters > Stylize > Wind from the left. Then … [Read more...]

The first rule of making PDFs is easy... do it in InDesign, don't even think of doing it in Quark. Navigation, linking to the web and even playing movies can be sorted out in InDesign first before the PDF is made. This way when the client has added his changes these elements … [Read more...]